Spend Matters Navigator: What Topics Do You Want to Stay on Top Of?

One of the challenges of traditional search engines and news aggregation sites is that they only take into account select information sources. Take Google News, for example. If you're researching a topic like "supply risk", chances are you'll find a few useful pieces of content from the trade and business publications. And if you're lucky, it might even bring up a useful blog post or two as well (though for blog searches, Google is way behind the times, offering an incomplete record of the blogosphere from a news or blog search perspective, at least in my experience). But when it comes to featuring a complete record of all of the relevant news stories from trusted publication sources as well as blog posts and industry analyst briefs, Google News and others fall short. That's why we created Spend Matters Navigator.

Perhaps most useful of all, Spend Matters Navigator helps you to see relationships between different types of content (some of which is free, some of which you might have to buy). Take the search on supply risk, for example. Chances are, a business or trade journal is going to break the latest news. Then bloggers will offer up their opinions and perspectives. But over time, the industry analysts very well might have the most informed, substantial written opinions on the subject. Spend Matters Navigator lets you freely move between different sources of information to research a topic. Think Spend Matters is opinionated bilge? Fine. See what AMR Research, Sourcing Innovation or The Economist have to say on the exact same subject.

If you're not already using Spend Matters Navigator on a daily basis, I'd urge you to give it a try. We've improved the size of the index not to mention the usability and query results significantly in the past six months. It's now replaced Google News as my primary vehicle to research posts for this blog. And if that's not evidence of its usefulness -- after all, I'm one of the busiest (perhaps frantic is a better description for those who know me) people I know -- then what is?